Merit pay for teachers can work

By Warren Buck

As a teacher, I’ve been encouraged by the spirited debate among educators and policy-makers around performance compensation (or “merit pay”) for k-12 public school teachers.

What makes me hopeful is my own teaching experience. I taught in Gwinnett before becoming a founding teacher at KIPP STRIVE, a public charter middle school in west Atlanta.

While we don’t have merit pay at KIPP STRIVE, we try to foster a culture that emphasizes accountability for parents, students and teachers and also prepares young people for college and life. Everything we do is designed to maximize learning and a culture of achievement through collaboration.

The benefits from this strong teamwork ethos lead me to believe that teachers and school leaders can work together to develop a fair performance-compensation system that rewards excellent teaching.

Teachers need to be involved in the design of any pay-for-performance program, since we bring classroom experience on what great teaching looks like and how to implement it.

Common sense also dictates that no single measure should determine whether a teacher receives merit pay.  Effective pay-for-performance systems rely on multiple data points.

Data is imperfect, true, and we should always work to improve student assessment tools. But data still gives us an important objective measure to evaluate how well students are progressing toward learning goals.

When evaluating teachers, we will want to measure not only how many students pass the end-of-year course exam, but how much progress students make in a given academic year. Cumulative student achievement data reflects not just one teacher’s work but the work of many other excellent teachers students have had before entering their current classrooms.

Using “value-added” achievement data would take into account the learning in the classroom and allow for more precise and fair evaluation of the current teacher’s impact.

A merit pay system should take into account schoolwide student achievement results, since teachers are part of a broader community. We should reward teachers if a school meets its own goals and objectives. This promotes a team-oriented, collegial environment, since all teachers stand to benefit if a school succeeds.

No effective system would be complete without an observation and peer review component. A fair, evaluative and developmental system could show new or struggling teachers a path to improving their teaching skills. A state survey indicates that 80 percent of Georgia educators support such a system. I have grown the most as a teacher from the feedback I receive from my teacher colleagues at KIPP STRIVE. By learning from my peers, I feel more invested in my goal of helping students grow.

Just as we should reward a high-performing school, we should also reward teachers willing to go to low-performing schools or otherwise hard-to-staff positions, like math and science. In Florida, for example, teachers are eligible for bonuses for teaching in high-needs areas.

There’s no question in my mind that all k-12 teachers in Georgia share the same goal: helping students reach their full potential. We can achieve this goal if we work with policymakers and elected officials to frame this debate, rather than letting others frame it for us. It’s my hope that teachers will take the lead in developing a merit pay system that elevates our profession and equips our students to succeed in the 21st century.

Warren Buck is a fifth-grade nonfiction teacher at KIPP STRIVE Academy in Atlanta.